With this blog, I am planning to offer, as regularly as possible, critical observations on the scholarly and popular literature analyzing the nature of archives or contributing to our understanding of archives in society. I hope this blog will be of assistance to anyone, especially faculty and graduate students, interested in understanding archives and their importance to society.

Saturday, September 27, 2008

Being Diplomatic

Let me state at the outset that I did not read all 800 plus pages of Luciana Duranti and Randy Preston, eds., International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems (InterPARES) 2: Experiential, Interactive and Dynamic Records (Rome: Associazione Nazionale Archivistica Italiana, 2008), available at http://www.interpares.org/display_file.cfm?doc=ip2_book_complete.pdf, a publication reporting on the second phase of this research project carried out in 2002-2006. I read portions, skipping around to topics that interested me or issues that caught my attention. Let me also state that I doubt many others will plow through this complex and lengthy document.

Most people working within the archival community know something about the InterPARES project, since there has been a large literature emanating from this project and a huge number of conference papers and panels devoted to it over the more than a decade that this project has been underway. Most working professionals also know that a critical aspect of this project is the theoretical framework of diplomatics as the core of archival science. As another matter of disclosure, I should say that while acknowledging the important contributions of diplomatics to archival theory, I am also a skeptic of many aspects of it and its utility for archival practice in the digital era.

Given the well-known reliance on diplomatics by this project, there are some interesting twists in this publication. Early on, for example, the following is stated: “InterPARES 2 sought to avoid the problems incurred in the course of InterPARES 1 that resulted from that project’s preestablished epistemological perspective on the concept of record. Thus, the InterPARES 2 researchers decided not to define at the outset the concept of record, instead leaving it completely open to any possibility as presented by the research findings and, consistent with this stance, to accompany the deductive approach with an inductive one.” In individual reports, there are also references to new and emerging documentary forms, such as the use of the Web by performance artists.

From time to time researchers refer to other earlier reports and projects presenting a broader view of the record, such as the MIT Appraisal Project. “On the one hand, the MIT project, which focused on the nature of scientific activity and the scientific record,” it is stated, “defines the scientific record as including experimental designs, documentation of instrumentation, experimental data records and analyses of experimental results; all entities that are in close alignment with the way the term record is interpreted in most archival contexts. On the other hand, the project also includes in its definition of the scientific record the publication of results in technical reports, conference proceedings and journal articles; all of which, because they are publications, are not considered by most archivists to be records—except in very specific and limited contexts (such as where the offprint of an author’s journal article is retained by the author as an evidentiary record of the act of publishing the article).” There seems to be a resistance to documentary materials that do not fit into the diplomatics definition of a record, perfectly acceptable if this project is about testing the utility of diplomatics in the modern digital age rather than a broader effort to archive electronic records. More to the point, however, is the fact that archivists need to be able to work with an increasing array of digital documents no matter how they meet some prescribed set of record elements.

The report focuses on electronic or digital records, broadly defined, examines cases in artistic, scientific, and government domains, including twenty-seven cases (twenty-three completed and reported on in this publication). These cases focus in interesting areas such as performance art, moving images, music, archaeology, cybercartography, astronomy, taxation, Supreme Court and land records, the use of GIS technology by archaeologists, the use of digital technologies by photographers, the functionality of government Web sites, and the development of data portals and repositories in the sciences. No one could ever disagree that this was an ambitious project in its scope, but answering the question of its success in resolving issues related to archival materials in digital form will take a lot more time. At this point, the project’s success seems to be in providing a rich body of literature on diplomatics and certain new kinds of documentary forms, all material which can be drawn by working archivists and for use in teaching (although faculty have a lot of work to do to recompose this into something that students can assess without getting lost – although that is always a responsibility of the faculty).

Anyone approaching this report quickly senses that it is too long and too unwieldy to read and absorb in any meaningful way. It is highly repetitive, essentially a pasting together of a group of long reports in each major domain, with each report repeating the same details about the purpose of InterPARES, the conclusions of the first phase of this project, and so forth. Why not write a slimmer volume reporting on the process, products, and results of this interesting project? Although there is much material on the Web related to this project, cited in this published report, doing this makes the reader question why more of the material could not have been removed, kept on the Web, and cited – creating a more normal and more reasonably priced book that could be used in classrooms and by practitioners. The scale of this book makes it very difficult to navigate around in, a problem made even harder by the lack of an index. In my opinion, books published without an index are incomplete. The lack of an index in a book of this scale is unacceptable.

Having said this, it is still a useful volume for seeing in detail a complicated, long-term, international research project. The assembling of research teams encompassing “a scholar of the activity under investigation, a technology specialist, an archival expert and a graduate research assistant,” along with many other participants is represented in its fullest. Different research methodologies employed are also described, such as Web-based questionnaire surveys, literature reviews, researcher surveys, interviews, and “tool-building and experimentation.” Providing such detail could enable the project to be replicated in other settings (although it is difficult to imagine it ever being replicated on this scale), and it also opens the possibility for the project to be critiqued for its methodologies and approaches (as well as its results); I expect we will see some of this kind of analysis in the future (although that is not my intent here), and I hope it energizes not just discussion about digital archiving but about archival theory (especially the utility of diplomatics for new recordkeeping systems, something some critics of InterPARES remain unconvinced about).

Such scrutiny is certainly justified since the project used graduate research assistants in the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia to do a “diplomatic analysis of each type of digital entity identified in each case study,” opening the question about whether this was a project about the archiving of electronic records systems or about the viability of diplomatics as a core of archival theory or science. These analyses were “largely restricted to the testing of each type of digital object against the five necessary characteristics of a record to determine if each object could be considered a record, or whether an object was more appropriately identified as, for example, data, documents or publications. Non-records generally require a simpler preservation model because they exist autonomously from other documents and their purpose is, typically, limited to dissemination of information. Briefly, to be considered a record, a digital object must: possess a fixed form and stable content affixed to a stable medium; participate in an action; possess an archival bond, which is the relationship that links each record to the previous and subsequent record of the same action; involve at least three persons: the author, addressee and writer . . .; and possess an identifiable context (i.e., the framework in which the action in which the record participates takes place), including juridical-administrative, provenancial, procedural, documentary and technological contexts.”

The report focuses on electronic or digital records, broadly defined, examines cases in artistic, scientific, and government domains, including twenty-seven cases (twenty-three completed and reported on in this publication). These cases focus in interesting areas such as performance art, moving images, music, archaeology, cybercartography, astronomy, taxation, Supreme Court and land records, the use of GIS technology by archaeologists, the use of digital technologies by photographers, the functionality of government Web sites, and the development of data portals and repositories in the sciences. No one could ever disagree that this was an ambitious project in its scope, but answering the question of its success in resolving issues related to archival materials in digital form will take a lot more time. At this point, the project’s success seems to be in providing a rich body of literature on diplomatics and certain new kinds of documentary forms, all material which can be drawn by working archivists and for use in teaching (although faculty have a lot of work to do to recompose this into something that students can assess without getting lost – although that is always a responsibility of the faculty).

Anyone approaching this report quickly senses that it is too long and too unwieldy to read and absorb in any meaningful way. It is highly repetitive, essentially a pasting together of a group of long reports in each major domain, with each report repeating the same details about the purpose of InterPARES, the conclusions of the first phase of this project, and so forth. Why not write a slimmer volume reporting on the process, products, and results of this interesting project? Although there is much material on the Web related to this project, cited in this published report, doing this makes the reader question why more of the material could not have been removed, kept on the Web, and cited – creating a more normal and more reasonably priced book that could be used in classrooms and by practitioners. The scale of this book makes it very difficult to navigate around in, a problem made even harder by the lack of an index. In my opinion, books published without an index are incomplete. The lack of an index in a book of this scale is unacceptable.

Having said this, it is still a useful volume for seeing in detail a complicated, long-term, international research project. The assembling of research teams encompassing “a scholar of the activity under investigation, a technology specialist, an archival expert and a graduate research assistant,” along with many other participants is represented in its fullest. Different research methodologies employed are also described, such as Web-based questionnaire surveys, literature reviews, researcher surveys, interviews, and “tool-building and experimentation.” Providing such detail could enable the project to be replicated in other settings (although it is difficult to imagine it ever being replicated on this scale), and it also opens the possibility for the project to be critiqued for its methodologies and approaches (as well as its results); I expect we will see some of this kind of analysis in the future (although that is not my intent here), and I hope it energizes not just discussion about digital archiving but about archival theory (especially the utility of diplomatics for new recordkeeping systems, something some critics of InterPARES remain unconvinced about).

Such scrutiny is certainly justified since the project used graduate research assistants in the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia to do a “diplomatic analysis of each type of digital entity identified in each case study,” opening the question about whether this was a project about the archiving of electronic records systems or about the viability of diplomatics as a core of archival theory or science. These analyses were “largely restricted to the testing of each type of digital object against the five necessary characteristics of a record to determine if each object could be considered a record, or whether an object was more appropriately identified as, for example, data, documents or publications. Non-records generally require a simpler preservation model because they exist autonomously from other documents and their purpose is, typically, limited to dissemination of information. Briefly, to be considered a record, a digital object must: possess a fixed form and stable content affixed to a stable medium; participate in an action; possess an archival bond, which is the relationship that links each record to the previous and subsequent record of the same action; involve at least three persons: the author, addressee and writer . . .; and possess an identifiable context (i.e., the framework in which the action in which the record participates takes place), including juridical-administrative, provenancial, procedural, documentary and technological contexts.”

This is, of course, acceptance of such a definition that many might question, and it suggests that a conclusion was reached long before the project ever began (go back and read Luciana Duranti’s series of articles on diplomatics in Archivaria or the book-length version of these essays); the individual studies in this volume suggest so many other workable definitions of digital objects extending beyond the parameters of the diplomatics tradition to mute the issue of whether these items meet the definition of records by this tradition and cloud the concerns about how to preserve these materials in the long-term. This final report recommends that “all documents the creator treats as records,” “that is, all documents that the creator relies upon in the usual and ordinary course of affairs, associates with other records and refers to as the records of its affairs” be preserved. The report authors conclude, “this is more consistent with the inclusive definition of the term ‘record’ used in statutes. It is the creator’s judgment of what constitutes the record to be kept for action and reference, and the preserver has then to assess the feasibility of preserving it over the long term.” Using diplomatics, the authors identify a “new category of records: potential records. Records have traditionally been identified as such retrospectively; that is, after having been completed and issued with a fixed form and stable content; but, with dynamic systems, there is the possibility of identifying ‘prospective’ records.” However, there is an awful lot of material to wade through to find this, and one wonders whether years and lots of money were really required to discover this or, if in fact, this is really a discovery at all, as others, both within and outside of the archival community, have written about objects for a long time (but given that the project seems to have been so inwardly focused on its own theoretical framework and avoided reading other archival literature by people it disagreed with, perhaps we should not be surprised by this).

This is an important publication, but I am not convinced that a more streamlined volume, with all the detailed reports online, would not have been a better publication. As it is, I suspect most will read Luciana Duranti and Kenneth Thibodeau, “The Concept of Record in Interactive, Experiential and Dynamic Environments: the View of InterPARES,” Archival Science 6, no. 1 (2006): 13–68, and let it go at that. However, then so much other interesting stuff is missed. This is important work. It deserves to be presented in a better way, and it needs to be read, analyzed, and debated. It represents the largest international research project ever done, and one probably never to be outdone.

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About Me

Richard J. Cox is Professor in Library and Information Science at the University of Pittsburgh, School of Information Sciences where he is responsible for the archives concentration in the Master's in Library Science degree and the Ph.D. degree. He has been a member of the Society of American Archivists Council from 1986 through 1989. Dr. Cox also served as Editor of the American Archivist from 1991 through 1995, the Society’s Publications Editor from 2002 to 2006, and he is presently editor of the Records & Information Management Report. He has written extensively on archival and records management topics and has published fourteen books in this area, winning the Society’s Waldo G. Leland Award in 1991, 2002, and 2005. He is presently working on new books on professional education and personal recordkeeping. Dr. Cox was elected a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists in 1989.